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She peered at the wolves again. What possible good could come of not having one?
“Now you’ve let it out,” Isaac continued.
Which was exactly what Gina had been afraid of.
The old man crossed the floor and peered through the glass. “They might crash through the window,” he murmured. “But I don’t think they will.”
“What?” Gina blurted. “Why?”
“I shot one with silver. They don’t like it much when one of their friends turns into a great ball of f
ire.”
Gina had meant “Why would they crash through the window?” Wolves didn’t do that. They also didn’t turn into balls of fire when shot with—
“Silver?” Gina glanced at Jase, who shrugged. The old man had finally snapped. “Maybe we should call the police.”
“They’ll only die.” At Gina’s startled expression, Isaac lifted his rifle. “Their guns won’t be filled with silver. They’d walk right into an ambush. Silver is the only way to kill a Tangwaci Cin-au’-ao.”
“What, specifically, is a Tangwaci Cin-au’-ao?” Gina’d heard the word in Isaac’s tales of the curse that lay at the end of Lonely Deer Trail. She’d thought it was merely what the Ute called their Angel of Death, but now she had her doubts.
“Man-wolf,” Teo answered, then glanced at Isaac. “Right?”
Isaac merely shrugged and went back to watching the wolves.
“Man-wolf,” Gina repeated, thinking of the glyph on the cavern wall. Things were beginning to connect. Strangely, the connections only brought more questions. “What the hell is a man-wolf?”
“Why do we suddenly have wolves where we never had wolves before?” Isaac’s gaze remained fixed on the window.
Answering her question with a question wasn’t even close to providing an answer. But then, with Isaac, sometimes the answer came in a roundabout way.
“Because they aren’t wolves,” he continued. “They’re Tangwaci Cin-au’-ao.”
“Man-wolves. I don’t know what that means.”
Isaac’s dark, endless gaze met hers. “Werewolves, Gina.”
“That’s insane.”
“Look at the eyes.” Isaac swept his mottled hand forward to indicate the scene still spread before them. “Those ain’t the eyes of a normal wolf.”
Gina inched closer to the window. “Give me the binoculars.”
Jase snatched Isaac’s pair from the end table. The old man liked to scan the hills; he’d always said he was searching for deer, but Gina no longer believed him. She lifted the binoculars, focused on the nearest waiting wolf, and gasped.
The gaze that stared back was freakishly human.
Wolves’ eyes were green or gray or brown, maybe yellow, but the color extended all the way to the lids; not a speck of white surrounded it. However, humans were a different story. Humans had eyes like …
That.
Gina lowered the binoculars, then handed them to Jase. “What’s wrong with these wolves?”
“More than you can imagine,” Isaac said softly.
“A virus? Rabies? What?”
“A virus, yes. One called lycanthropy. Why do you think there were no wolves round here till now?”
